Category Archives: Culture

Old Lessons

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Wednesday, April 23 was supposed to be a big meeting of Western countries and Ukraine in London where the Trump administration would make its final push for peace to end the war in Ukraine. The meeting was canceled due to the Ukrainians announcing in advance that they were not interested in any deal that would require them to make concessions. This prompted Marco Rubio to cancel the meeting, at least the portion involving decision-makers from the administration.

The lead-up to this now-canceled meeting has been a microcosm of how the Western political system now operates. For example, the period before the meeting featured stories in prominent nodes of the Western information control system about the secret details of the Trump plan. The sources for these stories were never mentioned, most likely because they did not exist. Instead, it was members of the Kagan cult, former Biden people, or schemers in the British government.

It was clear that these stories were coordinated as they all featured the same narrative and much of the same language. For example, they dusted off the old 2024 narrative of a freeze along the front line, something Russia has always rejected as both unacceptable and impossible to implement. The stories also all framed the deal as a major concession by Putin, the subtext being that he is now desperate for a way out of the war he started for no reason at all.

One point of these stories is something seen constantly in the West. There is the belief among the managerial elite that they can meme things into reality. If they just pack enough versions of their desired truth into the information control system, at some point this becomes reality. This has been repeatedly seen with the war in Ukraine, but it has been a feature of every major event. During Covid, they operated as if the news stories they made up were true for a couple of years.

One possible explanation for this is that a key pillar of the managerial state is the assumption that people respond to information, so if one controls the information, one controls the people. Since another pillar of the managerial state is that reality is made by people, it follows that one can control reality, or at least the perception of reality, by controlling the people through control of the information. The old expression, perception is reality, has become an article of faith among the elites.

Another part of this story illustrates how Western elites are only capable of thinking one move at a time. The reason for the media campaign was that they wanted the Russians to reject the deal, so they framed it as negatively toward them as possible, assuming the Russians would publicly respond. There was no thought given to the possibility of the Russians remaining silent. They simply assumed it was inevitable because this was a pleasing narrative to them.

This meant there was no backup plan. Instead, they had to have Zelensky preemptively reject the deal to avoid a public catastrophe. This last-minute cancellation is about buying time, which is another feature of managerialism. Western elites now operate as if time is always on their side. If they cannot shape reality to their liking now, then they just need to wait until reality comes to its senses. In the case of Ukraine, they remain sure they can outlast the Russians.

This sense of time probably stems from the fact that managerialism is a world measured in process rather than tangible accomplishments. Normal people measure their lives by what they have done. The managerial class measures their lives by the networks and processes in which they are a part. There is never any pressure to do anything in this world, so there is no need to worry about time. There can always be another meeting to discuss the things discussed at the last meeting.

This sense of timelessness has infected their approach to Trump. In his first term, the plan was to put the brakes on everything and wait until he either quit under relentless pressure or was removed. When he refused to go away, they peppered him with lawsuits, figuring time was on their side. Now in his second term, the court system is tasked with throwing sand in the gears to wait out Trump. The same thing is happening with the Ukraine war. It is endless stalling.

This is what gives the West the same feel as pre-revolutionary France. The ruling elite of France assumed they had time, which allowed them to avoid dealing with the serious problems facing the system. One reason for the radicalization of the masses during that time was the sense that no one in charge cared about the growing problems because no one could see any action to address them. The apparent indifference to what was happening became part of the indictment.

A similar situation happened at the end of the Soviet system. Gorbachev was something like Jacques Necker, in that he was in his position to fix the problems of the system, but the system refused to be fixed. His failure set in motion the process that toppled the Soviet system. Similarly, Trump exists because of systemic failure with the expectation that he can fix the system. Like the reactionaries of old, the managerial elite assumes it can wait him out.

Historical analogies are never perfect, and that is true here. The French elite, for example, understood the system’s problems. These were mostly smart, educated men with a deep knowledge of the system. The modern managerial elite is populated by mediocrities skilled only in the sort of scheming that is the basis of drama. They also possess a stunning lack of self-awareness. The people thinking they just need to wait out Trump also think they are loved and adored by the masses.

Wars tend to be what break dysfunctional political systems. That may be the case with the Ukraine war. Everyone assumes Trump lacks the resolve to walk away from this situation and leave the Europeans to work it out with the Russians. If he walks away from Project Ukraine, the managerial elite of the West will have a chance to learn that they cannot meme reality into existence and time is not on their side, or they will cling to these beliefs as they head to the dustbin of history.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

European Apartheid

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The word “apartheid” is like every emotionally charged word in the English language in that the worst people abuse it. In South Africa, it had a real meaning, as it described a real system. The word means “apart” and described a system in which the ruling white population lived apart from the black population. In modern usage, it has come to mean any race-based social system. The “apartness” is not so much physical but more of a moral distinction.

The West may need to invent some new words for the multilevel sociopolitical system that is emerging, especially in Europe. The rule of law and equality under the law are being abandoned in favor of a system that is loosely based on American concepts of social justice and social vengeance. In the United Kingdom, for example, there is now a separate set of rules for the white population. Whites, especially white males, are now to be punished more harshly than nonwhites.

This is mostly a formalization of something that has existed informally since Tony Blair flooded the country with immigrants. If a Muslim were caught rioting or raping, he could get off with a warning in front of the right judge. A native Brit, on the other hand, could expect the maximum penalty, especially if he could be accused of holding the wrong opinions about things. This is very similar to what we see in the United States, except now it is formalized in UK law.

This is spreading all over Europe, and unlike the United States, it is eroding the entire concept of a rights-based society. For example, a woman named Lucy Connolly was sent to prison for three years for a Facebook post in which she protested the mass importation of hostile aliens. In the United Kingdom, the police spend their days scanning social media for unlawful posts by white Britons. Twitter is full of videos of police abusing white people for their speech.

The reason the Prime Minister is called “Two Tier Keir” is because he supports the two-tiered justice system that has emerged in the United Kingdom. It is a bizarre implementation of the apartheid system in that it has a separate legal system for natives and immigrants but also compels the natives to embrace the immigrants and their foreign ways. On Palm Sunday, Starmer was at a pagan shrine, celebrating a pagan ritual that happened to fall on the same day.

Almost forgotten now is Tommy Robinson, a street activist who opposes the importation of Muslims and other immigrants. He has been in jail for so long that people have forgotten about him, which is the point. No one seems to know why he is in jail, other than that he says things in public that the government says white people should never say, not even in private. In the United Kingdom, like many European Union countries, you can be sent to prison for private speech.

In fairness, the UK is not alone. Across Europe, the lights of liberal democracy have been extinguished. They regularly arrest and jail people for speech crimes, and they are now arresting opposition politicians. Marine Le Pen is the latest example. In Romania, they canceled elections until they could find a way to remove from the ballot the candidate most likely to win. The Europeans are quickly becoming the old Soviet Union, with better consumer goods imported from China.

What you see in Europe is a more subtle version of what is happening in the United Kingdom, and that is a racial divide in the law. Muslims in France do not have to worry about the police reading their social media posts. If you are a French farmer organizing a protest, you can be sure someone in your group is an agent of the state. The state does nothing about the flood of migrant crime but will throw a white YouTuber in jail for holding views the state says he is not allowed to hold.

America was heading down the same path, as the media and corporations were embracing these same authoritarian policies. Largely due to entrenched cultural opposition and the revolt of key oligarchs, this decline has been halted, and the new administration openly supports civil liberties. That speech by Vance was as much a signal to the American public as to the European political class. The days of de-platforming are over, so they claim.

The real test will be how the Trump administration deals with these countries that flagrantly abuse the rights of their citizens. Everyone understands that Asians have a different cultural tradition, one that does not include things like individual rights, the rule of law, and respect for public opinion. China is never going to be a liberal democracy, so there is no point in punishing them for it. The same is true for the countries of the Middle East or in sub-Saharan Africa.

Europe is a different matter. The only reason for the United States to care about Europe at all is that it is both the ancestor of our population and the source of the moral framework that defines the West. Europe has the same moral obligation to defend the ideals of liberalism as the United States. Clearly, the current European political class has no interest in maintaining liberal societies. The United Kingdom, in particular, is an egregious case, given its role in the evolution of liberalism.

During the Cold War, the United States had different relationships with countries firmly on the Western side than those on the communist side or not aligned. The starting point was always respect for the rights of the citizens. Even during the Cold War, the United States exerted pressure on South Africa to end its apartheid system on the grounds that it was a violation of Western morals. One can question the rationality of that, but at least foreign policy was on something of a moral footing.

If Trump is going to restore the rationality of American foreign policy, it must include a return to a policy of judging nations by how closely they respect our understanding of individual rights and liberties. If the United Kingdom wants favorable trade deals, for example, they must open their prisons and release their political prisoners. The same holds for the rest of Europe. Their prison system must be dismantled, and the laws penalizing speech must be repealed and condemned.

Otherwise, the United States will be in the contradictory position of punishing China for its lack of Western values, while ignoring the grotesque violations of those same values by Europe. A sense of moral obligation has always animated American policy, for good or ill, and the primary moral obligation of America is the defense of the Western tradition of rights, equality before the law and respect for public opinion. America needs to break apartheid Europe, just as it broke apartheid South Africa.

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The Wilderness Of Lies

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One of the many things to spring forth from the political froth over the last decade is the level of coordination in the mass media. It was often clear that media activists were coordinating to create their preferred spin, but only with the help of conservative chattering skulls like Rush Limbaugh, who would create montages of media outlets repeating the same catch phrases. Social media now provides this service as the algorithms aggregate the stories and the repetition is too obvious to ignore.

Another thing that was not obvious is that many of the opinion makers, now called influencers, are in on the scam too. Often, they are paid by marketing companies to promote a viewpoint. The recent “soda money” scam where the soda industry paid a bunch of Twitter influencers to promote the health benefits of carbonated sugar drinks is an egregious, but typical example. The truth is, much of what the influencers do is paid for by marketing companies.

This is not just about moving product. The Israel lobby tried to secretly assemble a collection of right-wing influencers for a session with Bibi Netanyahu. Guys like Tim Pool were brought in so they could ask questions and be given instructions. Instead of paying them with cash, they get rewarded with access. This is an old trick that has worked on the media since forever. Look for Tim Pool and other famous influencers to sound remarkably like the ADL.

Payola is nothing new. In the golden age of popular music, record companies sent bagmen to big radio stations so the disc jockeys would play their songs. In the golden age of conservative politics, pens for hire were everywhere. Ben Domenech, one of the founders of The Federalist and RedState, was caught taking money from Malaysia to promote the interests of that country in his columns. Many other conservative pundits were caught up in that scandal.

This feature of the media exploded with the proliferation of digital media and the dominance of social media. It is also much easier to spot. The other day, a company hired by Ukraine did the soda money gag. This time it was a bunch of paid Ukraine supporters on Twitter repeating word for word the same erroneous claims about Chinese soldiers fighting on the side of Russia. The campaign was quickly suspended when it was too obvious to ignore.

It is not just the new school internet chattering skulls taking what used to be called payola, but also the old school types. This post by Victor Davis Hanson regarding the war in Ukraine has all the marks of pay-for-post. It has the typical neocon claims about the Russian army on the brink of collapse and the Russian economy in tatters, two stock bits of the neocon marketing campaign since 2022. Anyone paying the least bit of attention can easily spot those lines as agitprop.

The big tell that this is possibly paid opinion making is the claim that the proposed peace plan will create a DMZ along the border and the Russians will be forced to retreat back to their old border. Not only is this a fabrication, it is total nonsense. There is no such peace proposal and the only people claiming so are the neocons. They have been floating this idea since their 2023 offensive ended in catastrophe. Rather than accept defeat, they want a break to rebuild and rearm.

There are other neocon talking points sprinkled around the text. The claims about Russian losses are the most obvious. There is the crazy claim that Putin is trying to reassemble the old Soviet Union. There is also the mandatory criticism of Trump “art of the deal” negotiating style. Imagine Bill Kristol as a pinata and once he is busted open, what tumbles out are the main neocon talking points. Kids then took those and assembled them into that post for Mr. Hanson.

The Ukraine war has been highly useful in understanding the manipulation that lies behind the opinion makers. Whenever you see the phrase “full scale invasion of Ukraine”, you know you are dealing with a pundit paid by neocons, who are convinced this is powerful rhetoric. “Putin’s invasion” is another example. Normal people working at honest analysis do not use that language. These phrases are emotive signals to the neocon cult indicating a fellow traveler.

In fairness to Hanson, he is getting up there in years and he probably relies on an assistant to write his posts. American Greatness does not pay its writers, so no one can blame any of them for doing the minimum. It is a common practice for bigshot writers to rely on staff. Many of their books are written and assembled by assistants. The bigshot writer acts as the supervising editor. This is how Doris Kearns Goodwin got in trouble over plagiarism claims in one of her books.

That may be the case here. The person tasked with writing these posts simply relied on the copy provided from the neocon email list. On the other hand, Hanson has always been tight with the neocons. He has parroted their propaganda for years, so he could simply be doing the same in that post. That is the point though. In this age of zero trust, no one can be sure if it is honest error, ideological derangement, payola, or sloppy work from an old man nearing the end.

That is the world created by decades of media mendacity. As citizens trying to be as informed as possible, we find ourselves in a wilderness of lies. The “objective reporting” is all narrative storytelling to promote an agenda or a set of moral claims. Much of it is invented out of whole cloth. Analysis is often just payola, but much of it is part of a hidden agenda or a conspiracy. In a world where you cannot accept a man’s opinion as his opinion, you cannot trust anything.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Bell Ringing At The Top

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In the fullness of time, we may look at the sale of the NBA franchise, the Boston Celtics, as the bell that rang at the peak of the financialized economy. The team sold for a record-breaking $6.1 billion to a group led by billionaire William Chisholm, the managing partner of Symphony Technology Group. That firm has nothing to do with music or technology. It is a private equity firm. The deal still must be approved by the league and must go through the usual legal process.

The team is one of the crown jewels of the league, so it makes some sense that it commands the highest value. Since the beginning of the NBA, the Boston Celtics have been something like the New York Yankees—winning numerous titles and featuring some of the game’s greatest players. Wyc Grousbeck, whose family leads the ownership group that bought the team in 2002 for $360 million, made, on average, thirteen percent per year on his investment in the franchise.

By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about six percent a year on average, accounting for several crashes along the way. Median home prices in the United States have increased at about the same rate over that time. Some areas, like the Washington, D.C. area, have seen even larger jumps. Given that official inflation numbers are roughly half that figure, it shows that assets, even common ones like houses and equities, have experienced a steady increase.

Now, a golden rule of life is that a thing is worth what someone will pay for it, but value is supposed to be linked to reality. The value of a business, for example, is tied to the value of its assets, its cash flow, and future profitability. A buyer expects to recoup his investment over a specific period, which means the business either has profits or assets that can be sold for a profit. The Boston Celtics are a business, so does that mean the business is worth $6 billion?

The answer is no, not in the conventional sense. Most sports franchises are break-even businesses, with many losing money. They often have negative cash flow due to player salaries, which means they carry a lot of debt. The NBA is experiencing a sharp downturn in its popularity, with television ratings down 60% from the peak. The Celtics do not own their arena, so they lack that asset to supplement their business. Most likely, the franchise is a money-loser by conventional standards.

Of course, the new owners do not care about the business side. They are billionaires who want to be in the billionaire club. It is as much about status as it is about business, but the business side still matters. They no doubt look at the massive inflation in franchise values and think they will have no trouble flipping this property for a nice profit once they get bored with it. In other words, they assume the asset inflation we have seen since the 1980s will continue.

This makes sense in the context of the current American economic model, the one Donald Trump is determined to replace with a new model. The economy that emerged in the 1980s is based on unlimited, cheap credit money that gets plowed into assets like equities, startups, and frivolous things like modern art and sports franchises. William Chisholm is a billionaire, despite never having invented or built anything, because he is highly skilled in the legerdemain of modern finance.

Another aspect of the new economy explains why certain assets, like sports franchises and some tech sectors, have outperformed houses and stocks. The NBA is financed, in large part, by taxes it levies on every household. These taxes come in the form of cable and television bills. If you have a television service, you are paying for all those games you don’t watch. Channels like ESPN are bundled into the bill, and they are a significant part of it. That money subsidizes the NBA.

If, tomorrow, everyone could simply pay for what they watch, like software as a service, sports channels like ESPN would go bankrupt within a month. Right behind them would be all the sports leagues. The reason? Sports networks would lose about 80% of their revenue. That means ESPN could not spend billions on live sports content, and without that revenue, the leagues would collapse. That $6 billion sale of the Celtics would look like the worst bet in history.

The reason regular people feel so much economic angst, despite the appearance of material prosperity, is that we have reached the end of the line for this model, where costs are socialized but profits are privatized. The NBA is one example where the quality of the product has been disconnected from its financial success. In a true market economy, the owners of the Celtics would struggle to give it away, because the NBA, as an entertainment product, is in steep decline.

If you look closely, you will see this dynamic everywhere. The offset to those cheap products at big-box stores is the collapse of American manufacturing, and the social capital that came with it. The offset to cheap labor via immigration has been stagnant wages and emergency rooms that resemble Tijuana bus stops. The offset to a rising stock market is endless financial insecurity. The hidden costs have accumulated to the point where they can no longer be ignored.

The reason Trump is trying to usher in a new economic model is that the old one, the financialized economy, is running out of places to hide the costs of endless credit creation and the auctioning off of social capital. It is not just that we cannot borrow more money. It is that we cannot continue to socialize the costs of creating more credit money. Just as critically, we can no longer tolerate an oligarchy built on privatizing the profits of this system.

That is why the sale of the Celtics may be the bell ringing at the peak of the massive asset bubble that is the American economy. The absurdity of it should offend even the most zealous believer in the transactional economy. In a country with serious problems that require elite investment, watching rich parasites plow billions into a human flea circus brings revolutionary thoughts to mind. It may be the last grotesque gesture of an economic model that has run its course.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Artificial Tay Tay

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Note: Last night, Paul and I did a whole show on AI and the possible consequences of humanity being enslaved by robots. You can watch the replay here and here.

An unresolved mystery in popular culture is why Taylor Swift has become a megastar on the level of Elvis and Michael Jackson. There are plenty of simple explanations like her songs resonate with young females or she is non-threatening, but those apply to many pop stars, yet none have reached the heights of Swift. There is an answer, and it lies in the fundamentals of human psychology, but that answer also suggests that Swift is the death of the pop star phenomenon.

The place to start is with the most popular answer to why Swift is the biggest pop star of the 21st century: her lyrics. The most popular explanation for Swift’s popularity with young females is her songs resonate with them. Yet when you look at her most popular songs, they predate her supposedly young female audience. Her biggest hit is from seventeen years ago. Her next biggest is from eleven years ago. Most of her big hits are from over a decade ago.

That is the strange thing about Taylor Swift. Everyone assumes that her core audience is young females, but in reality, it is middle-aged single white women. Taylor Swift is a middle-aged woman performing hits from over a decade ago. She is a strange mix of current fads and recent nostalgia. Look at her audience and it is the young-ish females you see kicking around the cubicle farms of corporate America, and thirsty males who think a Taylor Swift concert is an opportunity for them.

As to the lyrics of the songs, there is nothing to suggest they are the hook that reels in her core audience. They are echolalic babbling. Pop music at its best is doggerel set to a simple but catchy tune. Most pop songs, especially female power pop, have a simple chorus that expresses a simple emotion, while the rest is gibberish. That is what you see with Taylor Swift songs. Her music also comes with helpful expositions so the listener can contextualize the simple chorus.

The point here is that there is nothing unique about what Taylor Swift is doing to explain her massive popularity. Her formula is the same as every female pop star when it comes to the music itself. Watch a Swift concert, however, and it is clear that the audience is not there for the music. They are there to see Swift. Like Elvis seventy years ago, Swift is popular for being Taylor Swift now. Her popularity rests on being a social phenomenon to her audience.

She is a social phenomenon because she brings other things to the female pop star formula that suggest she may be the last human pop star. The first thing to note is Swift is what young guys call “mid”. Now that she is pushing forty, she is getting a bit dumpy, but even in her prime she was a solid seven, the sort of girl old women would describe as pretty, which meant not homely but not sexy. In fact, her unique quality in the pop ranks is she lacks anything resembling sex appeal.

There is one caveat here: she has naturally unique eyes. This may be why she is so wildly popular with near-middle-age white women. White women put enormous importance on their eyes because it is hugely important to white people, who have a staggering variety of eye colors compared to nonwhites. A woman’s eyes are what will catch the attention of a male, which is why there is so much diversity in the eye color of people from Europe, especially northern Europe.

Women’s makeup puts the focus on the eyes. In some countries, like Iceland, women use makeup so you cannot help but focus on their eyes. In a land full of the most beautiful women on earth, the eyes are what matter. As women age, they tend to focus more on their hair and makeup, with the eyes being the focus. It is also why overweight women tend to wear a lot of makeup. The otherwise average-looking Taylor Swift is an appealing role model for her audience due to her eyes.

There is also the fact that Swift seems to be a boring person. There is no drama in her life or sex tapes leaked on the internet. The few interviews she gives are as compelling as watching paint dry. The closest she gets to drama is dating a football player who is not the quarterback or a superstar. For the women who could not land the star quarterback in high school, this makes Swift weirdly relatable. For her audience, Taylor Swift is the mirror who says they are the fairest of them all.

There are other things leading to Swift’s stardom, but the picture that emerges from these general observations is that it is a formula. Pop music has always relied on these formulas, but they were based on wisdom and experience. Now they can be based on massive data sets crunched by artificial intelligence. The data from who consumes different types of pop music can be combined with the human sciences, the history of pop music, and the software to create the music.

Soon, maybe even now, music executives can ask a couple of DOGE kids to create a pop star maker. They will be given access to the history of pop music, demographics of the current audience, and the quickly growing body of information from the human behavior sciences. They will then produce the attributes of stars in each music genre, their target audience, and expected revenue numbers. In other words, templates for every form of popular musical star.

Instead of hiring actors to play the part, like the boy band producers did in the last century, the music execs will ask their AI engineers to create them. The technology can already produce the audio, and the video will be here soon. That means in weeks an artificial Tay Tay can be beamed to the mobile devices of the target audience and through social media. Their reaction to the “new act” can be used to subtly tweak the “artist’s” algorithm based on those responses.

This may sound absurd but watch a Taylor Swift show and what you see are people holding up their mobile devices. People under the age of forty experience the world now through their mobile device. Theirs is already a meta-existence when it comes to experiencing things in the meatspace. This is accelerating with each wave of people entering adulthood. What matters to them most is not flesh and blood humans, but the avatars in the alternative reality of the internet.

Even if it does not reach the point of replacing humans entirely, it is easy to see why the pop star will not survive much longer. Taylor Swift is proof of concept. She is highly controllable, does not create drama, and ticks the necessary boxes that the formula says are required to be a star. Mass-producing many versions of this with cheaply acquired talent and software is the logical next step, maybe even allowing fans to create their own version of their favorite act.

That is the other thing AI will bring to music. Based on prompts and reactions from the target audience, the act can quickly evolve to their liking. The same process by which you prompt AI to create an image can be silently incorporated into the production of the next Taylor Swift. Not only can AI make the next Taylor Swift, but it will also allow the listener to create their own Taylor Swift. Artificial intelligence will allow everyone to have their own artificial reality in which their Taylor Swift speaks to them.

All of this assumes that some as yet unforeseen consequence to the rollout of AI does not bring the roof down on all of us. Even what we can contemplate opens the doors for life-altering consequences. Technology has destroyed the societal consensus. Just imagine what happens when we have our own popular reality stars. Even so, what Taylor Swift tells us is that the pop star as a human phenomenon is dead. She is the proof of concept that will lead to the Artificial Tay Tay.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Car

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Last week the Chinese announced what could be a great leap forward in electric car technology when the Chinese firm BYD announced a five-minute charger. They claim their new technology, it is not just a charger but a battery system as well, will allow a driver to get a 250-mile charge in just five minutes. No one knows if this is true, as Chinese companies are almost as dishonest as American media. Even if it is an exaggeration, it could still be a big deal.

The reason this is viewed as a potential game changer is that it is assumed that the main obstacle to widespread adoption of EV’s is the long recharge. It is unreasonable to expect people to take an hour to recharge when on a road trip. Even a thirty-minute recharge time is unappealing. Decades of needing just a few minutes to fill the tank have conditioned people to expect it. Getting EV technology to this point, therefore, is assumed to be the final boss in the game.

That is not true, but the faithful believe it. The main problem with EV’s is that they do not solve a problem. They are a solution in search of problem and so far, the problems they claim to solve have proven to be either nonsense or grotesque boondoggles executed by the worst people in society. Making the weather potato happy is not motivating anyone to buy an electric car, especially when the total cost of ownership remains significantly higher than conventional vehicles.

The electric car is a lot like the electric book in that the engineering challenges somehow blind the proponents to the central problem. Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Electronic messaging has displaced written letters because the former is better, cheaper, and faster than the latter. If email came with a small risk of electrocution, we would still be writing letters. If every email cost a dollar to send, there would be no such thing as email.

That was the problem with eBooks. They were not better in any way that mattered to people, and they were not cheaper. There were some advantages, like speed of acquisition and the availability of obscure texts. You could also load up on out of copyright material at a pittance. The trouble is not many people need ready access to Summa Theologica, so these advantages made little difference. It is why the old-fashioned book remains dominant.

The same problem plagues the electric car. For ninety percent of drivers, the car is a practical way to move humans from one place to another. Current technology does that as well as anyone could need. Therefore, the new technology is simply trying to match what the old technology does. Outside of enthusiast and technologists, the electric car will always be pointless. Add in the expense and it becomes an expensive solution to a cheaply solved problem.

There are other reasons why the electric car will remain a niche item. The biggest is the cost, which can never be overcome. The cost of powering an electric car is about three times that of powering a normal car. This is despite the fact that we subsidize electricity in America, and we artificially increase the price of gas and diesel. Strip away the policy choices and electric cars have no market. Natural gas-powered cars would have far more promise as an alternative.

Then there is the cost of production and disposal. For generations old cars have been sent to the scrap yard to be stripped for parts and recycled. We have become amazingly good at recycling our cars. Electric vehicles require special handling due to the batteries. Of course, the cost of production is much higher, even with government subsidies all along the way. Then there is the added cost to the power grid that comes in once adoption reaches a certain point.

Enthusiasts insist that all of this is wrong or can be addressed, but the point here is that the charge time is the least of their worries. If the EV was better, faster, and cheaper than regular cars, the charge time would be ignored. The truth is they are not better in any important ways, they are certainly not cheaper. The electric car is certainly faster, but outside the enthusiast niche, this does not matter and what we see is that it does not matter to the sports car enthusiast either.

Now, of course, there is a new problem. The electric car is not cool. It was never really a cool car, but the beautiful people embraced the idea, so that provided the necessary social proof for upper-middle-class white people. The trend setters are now vandalizing Tesla’s, so the cool factor is gone. In fairness, the novelty was wearing off before the kooks took aim at Elon Musk, but now the coolness is gone. The ridiculous looking cyber truck did not help either.

The bigger issue may be a social one. Cars in general, but electric cars, in particular, make the “owner” into a serf. Fixing your own car is now an expensive proposition, meaning you need to depend on the repair system. This is deliberate. Car dealerships make more profit from the repair of cars than the sale of them, so the game is to make the owner dependent on the dealer. Electric cars are the worst for this as they are terrifyingly dangerous to repair.

The most terrifying part is you may not even own the car. You pay for it and have the title, but features are increasingly dependent on the manufacture agreeing with your lifestyle and political choices. Tesla can disable your car remotely. Other car makers are going down this same path. Soon, features like heated seats will be software as a service, meaning you must get permission to use them. The electric car is the face of this dystopian future of man and machine.

None of this means the electric car is dead. There is a place for the technology, just as there is a niche for eBooks. The developers churning out corporate housing projects could install fast charging stations for the soulless automatons who move into these God-forsaken eyesores. Urban areas could be a good use for electric microcars that only go short distances. Young people could also benefit from cars that can be speed limited and tracked at all times.

In the end, the electric car is going to follow the path of other clever engineering projects in that its primary benefit is secondary. The quest for the electric car has made batteries much better. The hunt for new features to justify the cost premium has led to better electronics, information displays and safety features. The dangers of disposal have been a good lesson in reality. The cars themselves may be niche items, but the industry will have benefitted from the exercise.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

A Reasonable End

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Did cavemen feel guilt? Shame? It may sound like a stupid and pointless question, but it is a place to start when trying to understand the current crisis. While we cannot know if primitive man felt things like shame, we can guess. In fact, that is the point of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Shame and guilt were not natural to men until introduced by devilish forces. At least that is what the authors of the Adam and Eve story surmised when trying to answer those questions.

To feel guilt one must have a guilty mind when committing some act, which means you knew the act was wrong when you did it. You can also feel guilt for having unknowingly broken a rule but learning after the fact that you broke the rule and should have known you were breaking the rule. Shame works the same way. It is impossible to feel guilt for having broken a rule if you never know about the rule or you reject the legitimacy of the rule or the authority that made the rule.

Our cavemen therefore could only feel guilt or shame if in their group there existed a set of normative rules from a recognized authority. Given the simplicity of their life and the demands of it, they probably had few rules on individual conduct. Those that did exist were most likely related to the preservation of the group. Males had to be good hunters and not avoid pulling their weight in the hunt. Members had to sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. That was about it for their morality.

To answer the question at the start, the sense of guilt and shame was probably as primitive as the moral code that existed within the group. Given that early bands of humans were surely based on blood, as in they were extended families, not propositional collections of strangers, things like guilt and shame arose from the biological loyal that lies at the heart of man. We abide by the rules of our kind because they are our family, and we have a natural loyalty to them.

This works fine in small groups, but once small groups started to band together to defend hunting grounds and defensible shelters, something more was needed to extend that natural sense of loyalty to the whole group. The trading of women, which we know was a part of early man’s existence, was one solution. This binds the groups by blood and therefore tapped into biological loyalty. The human sciences tell us that the formation of larger human groups was biological.

This works with a federation of kin groups, but once human settlements reached a large enough size, this was no longer practical, so something else arrived. The solution to the limits of blood was religion, specifically gods. Distantly related people may not feel a great loyalty to one another, but those protected by the same god can feel loyalty to one another in service to that god. Guilt and shame over breaking god’s rules works just as well as guilt and shame over harming the family.

A crude way of summarizing this is we went from, “We are the sons of Grog and this is how the sons of Grog live” to “We are the people who live by this portion of the river, and this is how we live.” The next logical step was, “We are the followers of sky god, and this is how we live.” This allows for the group to expand, as new members merely must accept sky god and be accepted by sky god. It harnesses guilt and shame in the service of a group whose size extends beyond blood.

While the mental state of early man is a bit of a guess for us, we do know that humans organized around their gods. This was the state of the ancient world, about which we know a great deal. While what led to this stage of human development is a bit of guesswork, we know that mankind arrived at this point. By the time there are fully formed gods, there are fully formed moral codes attached to them that define large groups of people with a sense of identity.

That does not solve the puzzle of this age. We know that folk religions eventually gave way to universal religions. About ninety percent of humans belong to a universal religion, which means their religion is open to everyone. You do not have to be born into Hinduism to be a Hindu. Only a tiny portion of humanity sticks with folk religions like Judaism which have a biological component. Everyone else is open to people outside the blood, as long as they accept the moral claims of the faith.

Of course, universalist religion did not end human conflict. In fact, they probably made it worse as the base assumption of universalist religion is that there is only one way to live because there is only one moral authority. Once you accept that your god is the only god, it means the other gods are false. Worse yet, those gods are an afront to your god and they must be eliminated. The way to do that is to conquer the people who are offering up the false god as a challenge to the true god.

The modern West has complicated this further by removing God entirely from the Christian moral framework and replacing him with a mirror called reason. It is reason that tells us that there must be one way of organizing society. It is reason that tells us there must be one moral code. Therefore, it is reason that tells us that alternative ways of organizing society must be false. The same is true for alternative morality, which like a false god, is an afront to reason.

If you think about it, this iteration of the Great Awakening has been little more than the believers of one god attacking those who either reject their god or worship another God, like the God of the Bible. Not only do they hate your lack of guilt over violating their codes, but they also feel guilty for not imposing those codes on you. The followers of the god of reason ended up at witch burning as the solution to heresy. They seek salvation through the spilling of blood.

The crisis in the West is a crisis of reason. We have reasoned ourselves to a dead end where shame and guilt are tied to the assertion that there must be only one moral authority, and it emits only one moral code. Those who must have the warm embrace of faith now target their sense of guilt and shame toward their own kind, for the sin of not embracing what they believe is the only moral code. The rest are left to defend themselves and civilization from the true believers.

The question at the heart of the crisis is can the fury of these zealots be reoriented toward a folk religion or even a passive universalism? If the answer is no, then how can society defend against them? Another way of stating it is, can the cancer be put into remission or must it be removed? It is a terrible question that no one wants to face, but the West must face it. The god of reason is either reformed or removed along with her followers as that is the only reasonable thing to do.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Priestly Class

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One of the features of the first Trump administration was the endless litigation that was intended to throw sand in the gears of the White House. Much of it was irrational and did not hold up under appeal, but that was not the point. The goal was to kill the administration with a thousand cuts. We are seeing a replay of this in round two, but the administration seems prepared for it. There is both a legal strategy and a public relations strategy for dealing with the lawfare.

This lawfare is possible due to one of the many carryovers from the post-Cold War period in which the Washington class was allowed to run wild. The inferior courts where this lawfare is being waged are packed with friends of Washington. Half of the judges were nominated by Republicans and the other half by Democrats, but all were on the list because they are friends of the Blob. Time and again we see that the judges issuing restraining orders on the admin have family in the Blob.

One result of this is the ground floor of the federal judiciary is now the first line of defense for the Blob. Anyone challenging the regulatory state knows they first must make it through this minefield. It is one way to make the cost of challenging the regulatory state prohibitive. Almost all litigation against the administrative state would fail at the first step and then go to appeal. For most potential litigants, dealing with the hyper-politicized district courts was cost prohibitive.

Mostly, the district courts have become a weird form of patronage. These judges come from good schools but were not great private practice attorneys. Most found their way into a federal prosecutor’s office, where they could make friends with the political class to angle for a position on the bench. Once on the bench, they could then lever that into jobs for friends and family in the Blob. District judges are one of the many gatekeepers for entry into the Blob.

Here is where you see the social aspect of managerialism. These judges do not have to be told to oppose the Trump admin. They just know it is their role because everyone they know hates Trump. Judge Boasberg is not defending what he has always claimed to oppose because he is a hypocrite. He is simply putting the welfare of his friends and family ahead of political concerns. He is operating from class consciousness and the class he is defending is the managerial class.

Of course, the court system has been a mess for a long time. The Supreme Court that decided Brown simply invented a new moral code to be imposed on the American people by the judiciary. The court that invented the right to buy contraceptives and abort your baby was doing the same thing. When Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion stating that the right to marry is a fundamental right, he did so not as a legal scholar or defender of the Constitution, but as a secular priest.

The judiciary as a priestly class is always a risk because in a liberal political order the law is the manifestation of general morality. One reason we have so many laws in public government versus private government is the morally right choice for every conceivable action must be written down so the shamans in the court system have something to point to when making their declarations. That and it is the only way to overcome the traditions of the people regarding public morality.

It is how in 1985, US District Court Judge Russell Clark began a terror campaign against the people of Missouri. He took over the Kansas City, Missouri School District, forcing the people to pay billions in taxes to underwrite his madman effort to create paradise on earth. This terror campaign was allowed to go on for a decade until the Supreme Court finally got around to ending it. Two billion dollars were spent, and thousands of lives were ruined by a single lunatic judge.

What the district court system has become is a way for the managerial class to impose its morality on the rest of us, via the court system. Since there are over six hundred district judges, there is no escaping them. Every state government must act in the shadow of what is, in effect, an ideological enforcer for the Blob. The district courts are now an ecclesiastical court for the purpose of heading off any signs of apostacy before they gain public support.

In the short term, the only remedy for the Trump administration is to fight this weird priesthood in the court and the court of public opinion. Congress could help by stripping some power from the district courts, but Republicans are useless, so no one should expect that to happen. Chief Judge Roberts could step in, but he is clearly blobbed up, so that is unlikely. His behavior in the Obamacare case made clear he acted under duress to change his position.

In the long run, the solution is to make the district court position temporary, so it loses its value in Washington. Doing a turn as a district judge should be viewed as a resume builder for someone on partner track at a big firm or maybe as a career builder for a lawyer who wants to build his own firm. District judges were supposed to handle mundane administrative tasks to free up the superior court. Making it a steppingstone position would restore that function.

In the even longer run, normalizing the judiciary means the end of ideology, because as long as we remain an ideological state, there will be people who see themselves as priests tasked with enforcing the moral claims of the ideology. The death of ideology means morality is once against rooted in the traditions and customs of the people and the law has a process for that. It is called precedent. Since before Code of Ur-Nammu, this has been the basis of the law and an orderly society.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Fading Pop

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If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.

Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.

Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.

One reason for this change in popular music is money. The music industry, like every industry in America, is fully financialized. This means everything about it is driven by factors like interest rates, return over time and investment opportunities. A “new act” is not judged on musical ability, novelty, or the personal tastes of the industry people, but by the accepted financial models of the industry. Just as wind tunnels made all our cars look the same, finance homogenized popular music.

For example, now that Taylor Swift is packing on pounds and years, the search is on for a singer who will do the same act for the same audience. The “same audience” in this context is age, sex, race, and economic model. The next wave of that demo is not going to get excited by a portly spinster, so they will find a younger model with a slightly different look to do the role. Even if she is not as popular with the target demo, the math of the model is predictable and safe.

The same sort of math affects the live show business. The people hosting the show want predictable sales and returns. The people producing the tour also want predictable sales and returns. The reason for that is the investors want predictable sales and returns, so the live shows follow a proven model. Since the money comes from the same source in terms of expectations, the effect has been a narrowing of the music industry around highly predictable products.

Another reason for the narrowing of the business around controllable solo performers is the market has changed. People spending hundreds of dollars on live shows want a predictably good time. They are not going to invest in an unknown, because that might mean not having the expected good time. In a culture that prizes safety and security above all else, bands are a high-risk proposition. The culture they represent in popular music is an affront to the culture of the modern audience.

Another fact is the death of radio. Once all the pop music stations were consolidated into a few massive corporations, the result was corporate slop. The first to go were the music directors, then the disc jockeys were chopped. The soundtrack to the modern age is the monotony of corporate radio. The legendary “shock jock” Anthony Cumia talked about this in a speech he gave at American Renaissance. Corporate radio is now as dead as the garage band.

Young people still want to play instruments and make music and the tools for producing good music are now freely available. The days of needing a studio are pretty much over as far as producing professional audio content. That means interested people can create bands and put their content out to the world. In theory, the same democratizing process that we have seen in other forms of content applies to music, but for some reason it has not democratized pop music.

This suggests there is something different about popular music compared to writing, podcasting, or livestreaming. Anyone can make music if they desire, just as anyone can publish a book or create a political talk show, but the latter forms have been vastly more successful compared to the music variety. Music needs social proof to gain an audience and that is manufactured at the same place the music is now manufactured. Without corporate, it is impossible to be a pop star.

There also may be a larger cultural issue at work. The concept of the pop star is a 20th century phenomena. Prior to that, entertainers existed on the fringe of society, generally regarded as low status. The 20th century is when this flipped around, and we got big stars from the entertainment world. We may be reverting to the norm as entertainment declines in both quality and status. The disappearing band phenomena is not just an American thing. It is thing everywhere.

What we may be seeing with pop music, and maybe movies and television as well, is the end of a peculiar cultural phenomena. These forms of entertainment were spawned in the 20th century. As that time recedes into the past, the culture of that time follows with it. The important parts of that culture, like the rock band, are fading away as well, to be replaced by whatever the next culture desires. As the West finally leaves the 20th century it is leaving behind its culture.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Robed Radicals

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One way to look at the last ten years is as the struggle of the United States to finally close the books on the Cold War and the 20th century. The reason Trump exists, and the managerial system has reacted in such a violent way toward him, is that he represents the end of the conditions that made it all possible. The return of a strong executive and the normal functioning of government is the end of the managerial system and everything around it.

The comparisons to the late Soviet times are compelling because the Russians went through a similarly violent process to escape their own managerial system and the ideology that controlled it. Like the Soviets, America is now run by old people trapped in the past, lacking the talent to adjust to new realities. Like the Soviet system, the American system barely performs basic functions. Like the Soviets, American political actors can only break things.

That last part is important. Reform by its very nature calls into question the legitimacy of current processes. The reason for reform is that the system is not working to the satisfaction of the users, so it must be changed. Good reformers, however, do not attack the core logic of the system, but focus instead on the parts of it that implement that core logic to maintain the legitimacy of the whole. Maybe it means new people or possibly changes to parts of the system.

Reforms in the late Soviet period undermined the core logic of the Soviet system, resulting in poorer outcomes. We see the same thing in America. The response to Trump in 2016 by conservatives and their party only served to sap the legitimacy of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Trump started as a vanity candidate, but by January of 2016 he had become the champion of the party voters against the ossified party leadership.

Similarly, the behavior of the media cratered trust in the media. Their efforts to cajole, convince and intimidate people into going along with the managerial class eroded all trust in the media. By the end of Trump’s first term, trust in the media had collapsed to the point where only regime toadies trusted it. The same could be said for the people it was defending. Trump won in 2024 because the main tools of his enemies had been delegitimatized by his enemies.

We are now seeing another phase of this as district judges claim authority over vast parts of the executive branch. The last month has seen these inferior court judges claim to have power over the hiring and firing of personnel, the budgets of executive agencies and the conduct of foreign policy. A judge just ordered the military to enlist mentally unstable people. To stop the future, the managerial class is now destroying the credibility of the courts.

Public trust in the courts was already at a nadir because of the abuses we saw in the Obama years and then the Biden years. When the court ruled that mandating medical insurance was right there in the constitution, the rule of law took a sharp turn into absurdity, but when the Supreme Court ruled that two men sharing rent and bed is the same as your parents, then trust in the law was in free fall. It only got worse in the Biden years with the lawfare against Trump supporters.

What we are seeing from the courts now is the breaking point. No one would dare poll on it, because they fear the result, but there is certainly a majority in favor of the Trump administration telling the courts to pound sand. The whiffs of Sulphur the usual suspects are always sure they detect are not real, but rather they are the floral aroma of Caesarism in response to the reckless behavior of the courts. When the rule of law fails, the people always choose the rule of men.

While this may feel like a positive omen, there is another lesson from the end of Soviet Russia to keep in mind. Russia at the end of communism was a poor country, but a lawful country. It had rules that the people tried to respect. It then entered a period where it was a poorer country and a lawless one. When trust in the system collapsed, trust in the rules collapsed with it. It was only when a new elite emerged to impose a new system and new rules that lawfulness returned.

In other words, this dip into lawlessness we are seeing could very well portend a general descent into lawlessness. Like post-Soviet Russia, we could very well be entering a period where we get poorer as the rule of law collapses. Unlike Russia, America is not a homogenous society with a thousand years of history. America is a diverse country which is a polite way of saying it is a collection of people who would just as soon not share a country with one another.

If the elites backing Trump’s reforms wish to avoid a terrible end to their reform effort, they are going to need to deal with these hothouse radicals on the bench who cannot grasp the danger of their actions. The challenge, as with all reforms, is in dealing with the problem while not undermining the legitimacy of the system. These judges think they are heroes defending the system against the monster, when in reality they are a cancer threatening the last functioning part of the system.

It is not an easy task, which is why most reform efforts fail. In the end, it turns out to be easier to scrap the old and replace it with something new, but the problem is no one can predict who will win and who will lose in that process. It is why the reform is always the safe choice, despite the dismal record. It promises predictable winners. If today’s reformers want to be winners, then these judges need to be made into losers, without making the rule of law a loser as well.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!